Another Motherfucker

"What did you before?" "Oh, I spent a lot of time being a twat."

[odofemi]

Taking pleasure in bizarre heteronormativity as radical reaction to disgust with queernormativity.

[sholemhabibti]

[some-velvet-morning]

[mehreenkasana]

Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) by Chris Marker.

[elfyourmother]

shoutout to POCs who cant handle spicy food

[hamburgerjack-deactivated201404]

[praxis-makesperfect-deactivated]

[sholemhabibti]

I don't really know what I need to say to add to this piece of racist straight out of an Eli Valley cartoon overprivileged new media fuckery but alas there are jews on my FB laughing at this and passing it along. Let's be real here - the joke is that black/latinos (the non-model minorities) are violent and hypermasculine and take drugs and that plus yiddish and ashkenazi jewish culture is supposed to be hilarious. (I can literally hear some white person saying "no they're not just regular dudes they're gangsters!" - have you ever in your fucking life been to the hood and met a gangster do you think they are honestly like this?) And, you know, I could get in all about why this is fucked, but is there honestly any part of this video that isn't lazy and boring? (FFS, the producers of this are planning on more episodes!) 

That some white jew hired a black dude and a latino dude who are goyim for this and named their characters Daquan and Luis gives me flashbacks to all the liberal forms of racism I've experienced from white jews - the disbelief and amazement ("You're Mexican and Jewish? How did that happen?"), the tokenization, the endless othering questions as to how I live all my identities with no idea what can be done beyond pastiche, the fear and titillation at my hood upbringing, assuming I have only the most basic idea of MY religion and culture, etc. etc. And it's different from non-liberal racism of white jews who only value me to the extent I'll cast off my father but it's the reason why I skip out on so many shabbes dinners and just want to fast-forward the first hour or so of getting to know so many jews.

In summary, all white jews who are laughing at this and passing it along, you're failing pretty hard at ahavas yisroel towards us black/latino jews. If we non-white jews have a higher rate of assimilation/non-affiliation than white jews, part of the problem is your laughing at bullshit like this. Cut it the fuck out.

[h0odrich]

yall are so catty on the internet get your frustration out and slap someone in real life gotdamn

[sholemhabibti]

http://www.jrmip.org/

PS Does anyone want to help me translate this into Hebrew and Yiddish? HMU if you're interested!

[sholemhabibti]

I'd trust you about as much as I could give a shit about Taylor Swift.

[undercovertacobell]

We’re not all like that

all of them (via madeofmetals)

[sholemhabibti]

I bought a red and black striped scarf but it has an embroidered R on the end so you tell it's Ralph Lauren Rugby. 

[sholemhabibti]

Half andro dyke.

Half femme queen.

Dykes don't know what to do with her!

[sholemhabibti]

I'm walking behind this woman who from the back looks very professional young fashionable white woman, the type you'd see having cocktails at bourgie corporate bars in Back Bay flirting with businessmen and talking about their condos and upcoming trips to Brazil. Not common in my neighborhood but nothing I haven't seen a million times before. 

Don't pay her any more mind until I pass her and I see that the left half of her face has three tattoos of unrecognizable patterns (kinda cyborg-ish?), one under her eye, one to the side and another on her cheek (sorta game over in terms of respectability with a cheek tattoo). 

She notices me and then turns her head and the entire right side of her face is tatted down, hardly any space unmarked. But besides the face tattoos she's still bourgie/young professional in dress and hair, no piercings except ear piercings. She squints her eyes at me and turns in front of me to the left to enter the nearby police station.

Mark me down as confused but livinggggggggg.

[hystericalqu33n-deactivated2014]

maybe starting to understand the reasons for my disagreements with feminist and trans politics

-there are a thousand contradictory things about how i experience my own body.  i haven’t ‘always known who i really am,’  i have little investment in surgically altering my body, i rarely experience as a ‘woman’, a ‘man,’ as ‘trans’ in some fixed way, or as some kind of despicable word like ‘genderqueer’ ‘transsexual’.  i am invested in being on estrogen, on my body changing in that way, but don’t feel like i’m transitioning to anything.  i feel like a femme queen more than a woman or girl or something on a regular basis.  no gender has ever felt natural, but i might rather play some kind of femme character in life.

-‘fag’ as a category has actually probably been the most formative category that i have inhabited that has always been about gender presentation and rarely violence connected to sexual/romantic attachments to people perceived as men.  my effeminacy within the confines of a male body (which i will always recognize my body as) has always been the decisive factor in opening my body to an endless barrage of violence.  i think that this is a common experience amongst broke gender-confused male-assigned people.  i think it ties me affectively/politically to street queens, ‘transvestite’ hookers, femme fags that might be identified as cis by some.  in many ways it is impossible for me to separate my experience of gender and experience of sexuality as discrete categories because they never have been within my life.

-i cannot get behind man-as-a-class v. woman-as-a-class nor can i get behind these trans-asterisk ideas.  the man-as-a-class vs. woman-as-a-class position has little to no relevance in terms of dealing with the reality that globally many people who experience some of the worst gender violence are people who trans activists appropriate as ‘trans’ but who more often than not identify as gay, gay girls, gay transvestites, a variety of non-western gender categories, etc. 

-i just as much hate these new trans politics for the erasure of the complexity of the lives of these people (myself included) as well, for the creation of this ridiculous trans/cis as an absolute binary, the new extreme forms of identity politics that have been generated by this process, the inability to deal with the fact that changing the words about things does not actually affect social reality, the fact that maybe we shouldn’t be so invested in the words people use for us, the fact that gender dysphoria is rarely theorized in a broader context with other forms of body hatred/self-hatred/dysphoria, the fact that oftentimes people have so vigorously defended surgical options that we ignore the reality that nothing will ever totally eliminate feeling like a stranger in a world of gender and sexuality, the fact that there is a seeming contradiction in many saying ‘gay assimilation is bad!’  and in the next breath saying ‘i’m a woman just like any other woman!’. 

-i don’t really know where this leaves me other than exhausted and needing to find a better way of speaking about gender violence and gender rebellion that doesn’t have to invoke these horrible political projects that i hate. -open to thoughts about this from others…

[sholemhabibti]

Coming from a very different place but this gave me enough to have to respond to.

- I've always identified with women (wanting to be on their team, basically?) but I'm still unsure what difference in ontology/personality can lead a person to have a constant knowledge of themselves as a woman/female (what kind?) against a society that insists otherwise. Where I was raised there were trans women-ish street queens that were mocked and disrespected and while I was intrigued by them I felt like I did not want to be like that. Politicized trans ontologies and hope for an assimilationist future kept me in a strictly female identification from the start of my transition until, by accident of fate, passing took over and I can't be blind enough to not see that my binary identity is kept more or less stable by this fact. The fact that I am passable enough to go half stealth is a ridiculous privilege but even with this I have had enough life experience as a street queen/in the circles of butch queens and femme queens to start needing to reclaim 'femme queen' for myself even though dykes don't get it at all.

- I guess the point of all that is I don't think there's nearly enough analysis on what life circumstances in terms of sexuality, passing, sex work experience, trans/feminist "community" exposure, race, class, culture etc. lead to binary/gq/other identification, certain language/identity politics, conceptions of gender dysphoria and how to deal with its pervasive damage, liberationist or assimilationist or no politics. It's been so decontextualized that now we're only now even starting to assert that culture and race play a role in specific gender categories (which is totally obvious!)

- This package of trans politics that has been cobbled together with the input of academics and feminists but without street queens and sex workers and most of the people who are actually subject to gender violence, who could be on the TDOR list, is fragile as shit and just not doing enough. Fragile enough that most of the local politicized trans community start bugging when I've voiced the banal pattern I've seen a million times of trans men who are mostly/only attracted to women calling themselves queer while the trans women who are attracted to men calling themselves straight and wondering why that is. And that is not even the tenth of what needs to be said!

- "... The inability to deal with the fact that changing the words about things does not actually affect social reality, the fact that maybe we shouldn’t be so invested in the words people use for us" has had the effect of making most queer (not attracted to men) trans women bang their head against the wall of lesbian/queer women's scenes thinking that good politics and intentions will get them the community they need. And that's just not the case and I think any street queen can handle it better than some of these up and coming politicized trans girls.

Not completely on topic but there you go!

[raculfright13-deactivated201302]

[sholemhabibti]

Sex with men - it happens.

[buzzfeed]

BREAKING: Lil’ Bub hired as new BuzzFeed editor.

[strugglingtobeheard]

The entire thing is so cute if you click the link. Lil bub!!!!!!!

[sholemhabibti]

White stunt queens use cats.

[sholemhabibti]

fracture stories part 3

Less of a story and more of a realization: being disabled gets you sexualized! In really gross and uncomfortable ways! For the first week after my fracture when my arm was in a splint I couldn't wear a t-shirt all the way so I had to wear tanks tops with one strap underneath my armpit in an outfit otherwise consciously designed to deflect male attention I got more stares and leers than I've had in years: attentive men giving me their seats and guiding me with their hands and just very obviously doing this for something. And the same after the splint when the not really provocative tank tops were replaced by button downs and t-shirts, the same thing, ending worse when due to feeling less in pain and dependent I've been cold as shit to the men who tried to take care of me. 

Also among friends when I've aired very non-sexual complaints of being unable to change my clothes or tie up my hair etc., with few exceptions they've taken that into a sexual dimension. Jokes that imply my complaints are meant to be flirty, questions about what effect my injury has or might have on my sexual life and enough times to be disturbing talk of wouldn't it be nice if you had someone to take care/advantage of you in your weakened state. When in this time of feeling incredibly non-sexual I would only really like someone local who is OK with me naked so they could condition my hair right and that's it! (Makes me wonder if it's due to my sex work career and whorish subjectivity that I am so radically off-put in associations between sex and vulnerability/dependency. Are people really into that???)

All of this ends soon but is forcing me to flex my prudishness muscles in what I imagine is going to be damn near revolutionary praxis levels soon.

[sholemhabibti]

The Boston Metro marks TDOR by running a sensationalist front page story about the major social problem of trans-on-cis crime. Inside the fold, unnecessary details about trans medical treatment and a lovely pull quote of pure cissexism!

Send your thoughts to Boston Metro by phone [phone]) or by email ([email protected])

PS: Nothing but hate for the murderer Michelle Kosilek herself but this should not be front-page news especially TODAY.